Roommate is clingy and a bit creepy, neglects hygiene, seems unstable, and has weird habits. Now it seems like she's trying to leverage being friends with her to improve her habits.

I know this is a huge post. There's a lot of different things going on with this roommate and I've tried to outline them as clearly as possible because I feel way out of my depths with this.

I (25F) am currently rooming with one close friend (24F) and a new roommate (29F) who moved in two months ago. We've been maintaining a strained relationship with the new roommate who has some strange habits and serious hygiene issues but also feels we should always include her in whatever we do.

When this girl first moved in, I was alone in the house and thought it was a typical introvert/extrovert mismatch, but I made extra efforts to be conversational with her because I understood it must be especially difficult moving to a new space during quarantine. She is a very, very talkative person and very awkward but she seemed lonely and I have tried to be especially sensitive to it because I know quarantine has been tough for a lot of us.

After a while her needs for company became kind of overwhelming to me. On her move-in day I obliged her while she chatted with me for four straight hours. I tend to be a more introverted person and so we had a polite conversation about this a few days later. I'm also currently working full time during quarantine and have been setting up in the living room with headphones on since I was home alone. She's currently unemployed and would join me as soon as she woke up and sit next to me while I worked, waiting until my work day was over so she could chat me up immediately after. This was extremely draining and felt a bit clingy so I started working in my room with the door closed. She started hanging out in the hallway so that she could catch me whenever I walked out to make food or go to the bathroom so she could follow and chat with me. If I went grocery shopping or for a walk she would run to the door as soon as I got back. I asked her directly a couple times to give me some space while I was cooking or trying to use the bathroom. She would only leave me alone for a couple minutes and then come right back.

After two weeks, my friend returned. I was hoping this would help since now she had more than one person to talk to, but things have gotten worse.

First, she kept attempting to bribe us into friendship. She would insist on treating us to delivery or baking for us. It was a nice gesture at first but started to make us a bit uncomfortable because she wouldn't accept us politely declining. If we said we didn't want to order takeout because we had food at home she would sulk and just not eat.

She has also worn the same outfit and not taken a shower the entire time she has lived with us. There is no soap and no towel in the bathroom and our apartment has taken on this terrible smell of body odor and rotting food. She keeps her toenails and fingernails very very long and when she bites or rips them off she leaves them on tables in common areas. We've found three so far.

Another thing we can't get on the same page about is her grocery habits. She orders groceries online recreationally and hoardes multiple family size packs of perishable items. Our kitchen table is unusable because it is piled with her groceries. They're on the floor in the middle of the kitchen as well and our fridge started to develop a terrible smell. We asked her to look through and throw out her stuff multiple times but she would either say she would do it and not or make excuses. She said she was sunburnt and that it kept her from being able to bend down and pick up her things.

Strangely enough despite repeating the same outfit, she also kept ordering packages of clothing that she would rip open and leave scattered in the hallway but never actually unpack or wear. After a while, we asked her to do something about her packages, either get rid of them or keep them in her room. Right after we had this conversation with her my friend went to the kitchen on other side of the house and I was in the living room, separated by the hallway in the middle. Our roommate came back wearing the clothing she had bought for the first time. She had changed in the middle of the hallway while we were both in the common areas on other sides of the house.

The first time we tried to bring all of this up with her we were sympathetic and said we wanted to make sure she was comfortable and had everything she needed to live here. We assumed she might be depressed and have trouble functioning. She was overall receptive and said that quarantine had given her some bad habits even before she moved in. We asked her if she had someone to call or talk to but she assured us that she was fine. We ended on a positive note and I said that I was glad to hear that she was doing okay and that if she was we expected some things to change.

Honestly, I do believe her when she says she's not depressed. I struggle with depression myself and know that everyone's experience differs and that she may not have been comfortable divulging more but she seemed to get instantly comfortable around us and have infinite energy to socialize and chat.

We felt optimistic following the conversation but things only got worse. There appears to be some issue with her room. She has not fully moved in and has been lying about it. After we spoke to her about changing in the hallway the packages remained there for another week. After asking her to move them again multiple times I got frustrated and piled them up in front of her door, assuming she would take them in when she went back. She now alternates between the same two outfits rather than the one. Whenever she's wearing one the other lies crumpled on the floor outside her door along with the other packages.

We asked her again to put them in her room and she said something about how there was no space on her floor. But that's not true. We had to open our doors for a virtual tour which was the first time we saw inside her room. She has been sleeping on a mattress with no sheets and no pillowcase, and has been taking throws from the living room to sleep with. She does not have any other clothes and no suitcase. It appears she moved in with nothing.

She has family a short drive away and her dad has visited a once or twice (though we have never met him), but he has apparently at no point dropped off any basic toiletries or clothing for her. We had yet another conversation and tried to bring this up with her but she consistently denies it and won't be honest with us. She plays dumb and says things like "oh I was working on my computer" and "I just started redecorating" even though we know her room is bare and dusty apart from the minimal furniture that came with it.

She also never spends time in her room apart from to sleep and goes to the living room first thing in the morning when she wakes up. She stays there, not moving, not using the TV, not doing anything until 1 am when she goes to bed. On days my friend or I have tried to grab the living room to work from home she will still come and joins us which is a bit distracting because she hovers waiting for us to remove our headphones and interact. When we've asked if she could give us some space to focus, she will linger in the doorway outside the living room staying in sight but never officially stepping inside.

She does leave for a couple hours each day when she has a screaming fight with her family on the phone one block away from our house. I don't think she knows we can see or hear her from the apartment but she yells, stomps her feet, and goes red in the face. The last time her dad visited we saw her through the window waving her arms threateningly and yelling at him in person. He didn't seem to fight back. She seems to really loathe her family but her main complaint is that they didn't cook enough for her when she was home and that made her feel like she needed to fend for herself. (This seems silly to me because she's nearly 30 and her family already pays her bills since she's jobless).

After a month of living with her, my friend and I asked if we could have the living room to ourselves for one night to video chat with a couple of our mutual friends. She said yes but then sulked and sat in the middle of the floor in the kitchen while we chatted. I had to walk around her to refill my water bottle in the middle of the video chat and when I got to the kitchen she asked me if I was still chatting, clearly waiting to go back to the living room. I said yes. She then confronted me and said she felt like I wasn't talking to her and acknowledging her presence enough and that she had a right to be in the common spaces too. This baffled me because, like I said, this was the first day we had asked for the room to ourselves. We had tried to use it to work but could never get her to stop hovering so we would eventually just retreat to our rooms.

We also had been joining her in the living room in the evenings a couple days a week but on certain days would stay in our respective rooms because we just didn't have the energy to interact after a long work day. We have felt put off by these strange habits and her lack of respect for our living spaces.

I said that it wasn't our intention and that we definitely had a more relaxed way of hanging out. We prefer to watch TV together whereas she always wants to chat. She went on about how she would normally spend more time outside the house but now she couldn't and her roommates wouldn't interact with her enough. After her pressing for a while I was honest with her and said that I felt we were still interacting within our comfort level and that I didn't know if I could be her best friend right now. My friend eventually noticed I had been gone for a while and joined me. It really felt like this new roommate was disappointed that we weren't willing to fill the interaction quota she needed, but we're her roommates. It's not our responsibility to also be her friend, parent, maid, and therapist. We also brought up the cleanliness things again. We've tried politely. We've tried being firm. We've tried joking with her about it. We tried giving her a deadline. We were civil but curt because honestly we've been trying to communicate this so over and over again. We are not obliged to be her friend or pick up after her.

What's strange is also that she is extremely awkward and she seems like she doesn't have many friends which does elicit pity. She also has all of these weird habits which make me think she's not fully mentally stable, but she's weirdly lucid and pushy when she's fighting back with us.

Since then, we have gotten a bit colder with her. We found a rotting banana in the bag and told her firmly, once again, that it needed to be cleaned up and that it was smelling up the kitchen. She threw away the one banana and then moved all her groceries from the floor into the dining room chairs. When we told her to put them AWAY not just on a different surface she said that if it bothered us so much we should just go ahead and throw her things out for her. This feels extremely entitled to me. Again, I am not her parent or maid. We know she is allowed to be in the common areas but because she always takes over the living room, we have started hanging out on the porch.

The last straw came this past weekend. I walked out of my room to use the bathroom and found her running away from me completely naked in the hallway. Her room is at the other end of the house.

Yesterday we had yet another conversation. We outlined that we understood she had developed bad habits during quarantine but that it was absolutely not okay for her to be naked in the common areas. We asked her again if she had everything she needed to live here. She deflected all of our questions and said she felt like we weren't even treating her like a human being, that it hurt her to hear us laughing on the porch when she wasn't included, and that it made her willfully not want to do anything we asked of her. She was basically trying to infer that if we wanted her to pick up after herself we needed to have more conversations with her throughout the day about things unrelated to the cleanliness of the house.

I am at my wit's end. We have been so patient with her and it seems like she's withholding cleanliness until we agree to be her friend and spend more time chatting with her. I also have absolutely no idea what is going on in terms of her screaming conversations with her family, the nudity, her smell and hygiene, and her lying about moving in.

I love this apartment. I feel like we've fully furnished and kept up the common spaces and made them comfortable so that she could take advantage of them. We only have 3 months left here after which I'm moving cities so I would prefer not to have to move within then but it's starting to seem like the only option. This got away from me for a bit, but thank you for reading.

tl;dr: Roommate doesn't shower, leaves nail clippings out, was naked in the hallway, and hasn't moved in with any belongings for months. When we try to confront her she tries to leverage our friendship for basic cleanliness.

Submitted June 04, 2020 at 03:11PM by Strawberry_Curious https://ift.tt/3gPl6hj